Author | Twenty-Four
Chim is the manager of the niche clothing fashion brand BORSCHT, and a few days ago, at the invitation of Taobao officials, he settled in Ali State Stick.
This is a new and main young people's trend culture of the e-commerce community, mainly around the scene, clothing, outdoor, shoes, gifts, life, food, pets and other content, Slogan for: China creation with attitude. It is still in beta and requires an invitation code to sign up for login.
Chim told Chopped Pepper TMT that he chose to test the waters of the stick because he has not yet found other trendy original vertical platforms and content communities that can both grow grass and pull grass.
In the DTC mode of the stick, the brand manager can accurately lock the target user, understand the real user experience, narrow the distance with the user, and can also capture the key user data carried in the contact points and precipitate customer data assets by interacting with consumers. This is not only conducive to product development and personalized services, shortening the product development cycle, but also improving user stickiness and quickly forming a closed loop of consumption.
Since Taobao itself has stores, chim only needs to copy product data to the stick with one click, except for fan data. This means that the stick has broken through the content barriers between Taobao, but it still operates as a separate APP model.
As an independent product of Alibaba's business, the launch of the stick exposes Ali's ambition to share the trend of e-commerce and tear open the new entrance to content social networking.
But before there are things, little red books with the trend and social to the peak, after the vibrato to do vertical trend e-commerce "vibrato box", can the stick grasp the needs of young people?
State stick: Sift out the young people of Taobao
Although it is an internal test, Xiaoyun after 00 easily got the invitation code on the home page of the Xiaohongshu account, and after half an hour of hands-on operation, she smelled the smell of belonging to young people.
As an e-commerce community that focuses on the trend culture of young people, the sense of "young people" label is indeed strong.
From the beginning of registration, "Liu Bei who grazed on Sanban Island" and "Rulai who drank goji berries at the tip of the horn" were recommended to be very young.
Entering a look, the APP theme is black and green, and the trend tone is low-key and introverted, but it hides a sense of light, which makes people impressed at the first time.
The content layout has also laid the platform tone for its promotion of "serving young users" and "providing new ways of life consumption". The 7 sections on the homepage, such as "Nightlife Party", "New Chinese Players" and "Invincible Street King", capture the life scenes that young people consume the most.
Especially the new scene of traveler camps. In the past two years, camping has no longer been niche, and has gradually become a common choice of lifestyle for young people, and the scale of Tmall outdoor products has doubled for two consecutive years, from basic camping equipment to clothing and kitchen utensils, all of which are upgrading to trendy and high-end.
At the same time, the language form set in the APP terminal is unique, which is closer to the communication form of young people, such as replacing the traditional "like and not interested" with "stick and huh" in the attitude community.
In the view of product manager Ellie, the content ecological layout of the stick is more like Taobao's "young version", and the navigation bars below are "Home", "Attitude" community (similar to Taobao's "shopping"), "Message" and "My" buttons, still have the shadow of Taobao, purely a module of shelf e-commerce.
From the closed loop of planting grass to pulling grass, in the product page, users can slide up and down, for the desired goods can be purchased directly, the purchase process is the same as on Taobao, in addition, the system will recommend similar products for users to choose, purchased users can click "statement" on the product page, publish their own brief evaluation of the product, similar to Taobao's buyer show.
However, the difference with Taobao is that the state stick strengthens the social attributes, the navigation bar below does not have the original "shopping cart" function of Taobao, replaced by a photo and post function similar to the Little Red Book, the user can express his "attitude" to the product in the "state stick", that is, the planting of grass for the product, the content of the grass will be displayed in the "attitude" community column for others to refer to and interact. In Taobao, this function is hidden in the shopping.
The last "my" entrance, unlike the content barrier between Tmall and Taobao, does not record the user's shopping history on Taobao.
How to build a trendy community?
The function of a trendy community is only "face", and having high-quality content is "Lizi".
For young people, the trend is a way of life, a positive spiritual belief, the community is like the integration of the trend lifestyle, users communicate and share with each other, pass on the trend life, and are willing to pay for the high value-added products or lifestyles that identify with and like.
To talk about the model of the trend community, it has to be mentioned that in 2021, the few users are still growing rapidly in the content community Xiaohongshu, double-column waterfall product form, real, altruistic note sharing has become its unique advantage.
Because of this, many big manufacturers are aware of the huge traffic that content brings to e-commerce and have begun to pay attention to the value of the content community. For example, Taobao uses "shopping" to replace the first-level entrance of "micro-tao", and the basis of the consumer ecology is e-commerce transactions, and it is also the entrance to the aggregation of video, live broadcast, buyer show, talent show and other content aggregation accumulated by Taobao for many years.
But what follows is that due to the large and complete Taobao category and the large and complex user tags, merchants have no way to operate accurately.
On the other hand, looking at Xiaohongshu, there are a number of accurate users with relatively high consumption power, goods with high unit prices and high gross profits, as long as they do a good job of content planting, they can have a niche market.
Chim feels that the planting mode of Xiaohongshu is very suitable for his preferences, and as a dress blogger, he deeply feels that the atmosphere of the Xiaohongshu community is very good, the willingness of fans to interact is strong, and there are many real comments, and many fans can easily have the impulse to buy and consume after browsing his notes.
The owner found that most of the big Taobao-brand stores such as the Crying Center Crying Center currently choose to send content and plant grass in Xiaohongshu.
However, because the content of Xiaohongshu and e-commerce are not so closely integrated, even if many brands have opened potato stores in Xiaohongshu, the platform with the largest sales is still on Taobao.
In Chim's view, there are more female users of Xiaohongshu, which is also the main purchasing power, resulting in potato stores being more inclined to women's clothing stores, and there are certain limitations for brands like him that are more neutral in design.
Therefore, the current fashion trend is that most tide brands will choose to plant grass in The Little Red Book and Taobao to pull grass.
From this point of view, the launch of the stick or want to help Ali solve the problem of young people's interest in socialization, grass consumption, accurate positioning of young consumers, "attitude" community is like the trend of the "tree hole" and "small world", both topics, but also social, young people can not only shop, but also chat with the manager, in the atmosphere of the active community to meet friends.
Who can open up the "community + trend e-commerce"?
But as we all know, attracting young people, competing for the right to speak on the trend, and creating a "community + trend e-commerce" is not a pioneering view. In addition to the fierce battle of Dewu and Xiaohongshu, big factories such as Byte, Sina, JD.com, and Pinduoduo have also laid out.
First of all, speaking of things, when it was just established, it was positioned in the "trend community + exchange platform", when it was established, there were a number of sneaker die-hard fans, and now it has been replaced as a trend commodity trading platform, and the identification ability has become a unique advantage that cannot be replaced, in the C2B2C mode, the seller needs to send the sneakers to the real and false identification of the goods and then send them to the buyer, with the "fidelity" established e-commerce advantages, the accumulated original users, bringing strong purchasing power to the platform.
At present, the product has expanded the model to 14 categories other than shoes, including fashion clothes, bags, beauty, some bags, shoe designers settled in the goods, according to a merchant interviewed by Tech Planet, the goods are very easy to start, not how to operate, sales can exceed expectations. But the low flow of grass in the community limits the speed of development.
The Little Red Book, which has high-quality content and accurate traffic, is in turn constrained by "pulling grass from the station". The two obvious shortcomings have allowed giants such as Ali, Douyin, and JD.com to see the market and join the ranks of the Z generation, but many of them are just "a light taste", and after three minutes, there is no heat.
In 2020, Pinduoduo once launched a WeChat Mini Program "Duochao", which aims to provide a platform for young people to view and communicate with trendy goods, but due to the "contradiction" between Pinduoduo's attributes and the consumer culture of sneakers, there is no concept of "circle" to strengthen the user's sense of identity plus community operation, and now the Mini Program has been removed.
In 2021, JD.com also tested the WeChat mini program "Mustard Mo", a trendy attitude interactive platform built for young people, and now it is missing.
The high-profile Douyin box launched at the end of 2021 has not been able to reproduce the miracle of Douyin's past. At first, the Douyin box came up with a hard-core subsidy play, and many brands were optimistic about the role of the Douyin box in the content planting, and did not want to miss the potential early traffic dividend, but the operation strategy had yet to be explored, resulting in many brands not daring to rush into the market.
At the same time, the Douyin box has not yet undertaken the huge traffic from Douyin, and there are still deficiencies in the number of users and merchants, and it is impossible to provide a rich commodity shelf like platform e-commerce.
With a strong supply chain, the stick can indeed quickly attract national tide stores and young people to settle in the short term through subsidies, diversion and other means, but how to form and maintain a community sharing atmosphere is a problem to be solved for products that want to be contented and community-based.
In the attitude community, the chopper saw that the attitude community launched the topic of "Wonderful City of Attitude Sticks", and recently launched the "Post-00s Ask Post-90s" graduation preparatory plan, asking social experience people to answer questions for social trainees, a daily interesting theme, such as "Is doctoral work a dimensionality reduction blow?" "The Truth About Entertainment Work That I Don't Know", the topic of discussion is not based on the products on the site, but on the interests that young people are concerned about. Some netizens joked, "I thought I had opened the BOSS direct recruitment."
In the "New Power of the National Tide" scene in the recommendation column of the homepage, there will also be votes on the attitude of the national tide, such as "Must the national tide have traditional Chinese elements?" "What is the price ceiling that you are willing to pay for the national tide", "The street style is the orthodoxy of the national tide" and so on.
Even if you want to be recommended on the home page, you need the fans of the store to publish high-quality content, and the store will have the opportunity to select the resources of the big coffee.
It can be seen that the content operation of the stick is not the same as shopping, it has gone beyond the scope of e-commerce and good goods, and it wants to be a platform that attracts the attention of young people and shows young people's ideas and opinions in an all-round way.
Chim added his opinion, "In a lifestyle shopping platform, there will be no one interested in focusing on the topic of employment or reading." Wouldn't it be more appealing if there was more content to eat and drink?
If you want to introduce Chinese manufacturing with an attitude, you can also join some senior editors to do niche, personal taste promotion, you can also dig and visit brands and stores, because now a lot of wear or promotion is a hard push, and it feels like there is no process of excavation and exploration. ”
Due to the small number of users in the internal testing stage, it is still mainly based on the owner sharing store goods, in Xiaoyun's view, it still feels like people want to evaluate the products. Including the bullet screen of the homepage product flow, it is just a product review in a different form.
Therefore, out of shopping habits, Xiaoyun said that as a lazy worker, she will still choose Taobao, if there is no community content, she does not understand why she has more identical things to occupy memory.
Chopper paid attention to the fact that in order to produce real, high-quality community content sharing, the stick is very friendly to creators, and has released the #Guochao Class Representative Collection Contest and the #Guochuang State Speaker Recruitment Plan", hoping that the content sent by ordinary people can also get attention and interaction, as well as cash rewards.
Improving the community experience to encircle users, and then relying on e-commerce experience and subsidy strategies to promote transactions, as a rising star, how wide and far the trend road can go remains to be tested.
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